There is a Future in Tech Tracking and the Insurance Coverage We Receive

Recently on TechCrunch an article was posted about a company in Ohio that has raised a lot of investment capital on the basis of combining tracking technology and your driving habits to be able to receive car insurance.  Today, we already have a wide variety of apps on our phones that track everywhere we go in order to profit from advertising to us based on where we live, where we travel, and what websites we visit.  This was already reported back on 2015, John Hancock was pursuing the idea of combining an insurance company policy model with sharing from fitness tracker data.  Their partnering with the company Vitality (who does the combining of wellness benefits with life insurance) is to provide a rate discount to those leading a “healthier” lifestyle.  Again, last September the Washington Post reported on an update concerning this joining of efforts by John Hancock Insurance company.  It is only a matter of time before this becomes a routine trend in business.  The location data from these health trackers is already sold for advertising profit as mentioned before so selling to insurance companies is not much of a step beyond the current status quo.  At what point do more insurance companies buy into this idea and mandate the requirement for tech data tracking in order to provide service (life, auto, etc.).  Now, future organizations might mandate the tracking of whether you look at your phone while driving (even if Google Maps is up but that can be tracked too) or exercise 3-5 times a week or take those recommended 10,000 steps (these trackers already track heart rate and weight).

If this happens, how will the people respond to an already unregulated data privacy industry that is thriving off the lack of rules (except the General Data Protection Regulation [GDPR] for personnel in the European Union) concerning what happens to your data once siphoned off and uploaded to a major corporation’s cloud server (that probably resides on an unsecured Amazon S3 bucket – see almost every data breach over the past 2 years).  Making matters even more complicated, one of the provisions in the Affordable Care Act (AKA Obamacare) provided a provision for employers and employee wellness companies to offer “incentives” to those employees and consumers who wear fitness trackers (this was pointed out by Tom’s Guide back in 2016).  Now, we have legal incentives to offer this “service” along with the possibility of it becoming a reality in at least one company (with many other to follow after the implementation model is developed).  In the future, insurance companies will most likely be offering fitness trackers and discounts to those willing to participate in these tracking options for a discount (if not already happening today).  This would be similar to police departments being identified as giving away free Amazon Ring web-cameras to homeowners who agree to let the police have access to the footage.  This is a great idea if something bad happens.  Unfortunately, time and again, the abuse of such capabilities can get bad quickly and become rampant, as Edward Snowden revealed about his experience working for the National Security Agency.  I don’t disagree in concept with the intention behind these acts, I don’t trust the people who will be put in place to conduct the monitoring and execution, especially when it is KNOWN to happen at all levels.  The idea of these cameras also creates a “police state” where I don’t know who’s looking at me and why.

 For myself, when my insurance agency calls, I would like to keep the freedom of NOT sharing all of my personal data with them.  Not that I have anything to hide, but I don’t want to be unknowingly penalized for reasons unknown to me (or because I like to eat chocolate cake).  I also don’t like the possibility of being forced to behave in compliance with some insurance company’s enforced rules if I don’t want to (and keep the freedom to keep either a Fitbit or an Apple Watch or a Samsung watch, etc. without additional responsibility).  The normal legal rules are good enough for me.